> For highly proficient users, this gets even worse as their is no command key equivalents for cut, copy, or paste. […] Part of the unspoken reason desktop clipboard use is so high is the speed in which it can be used. Mobile has none of this.
I recently discovered [1] that iOS has several three-finger pinch/swipe gestures for copy, paste, cut, undo, and redo. Apparently these gestures were introduced in 2019/iOS 13 [2]. While they are certainly not the easiest gestures to reliably perform, they at least do not suffer from the issues of ambiguity described by the author.
[1]: accidentally, of course, because the discoverability of many features on mobile is quite poor
> Lately some weird new copy and paste bar appears, no idea how I’m triggering it.
iOS 13 added a whole set of gestures that all key off of three-fingered interactions with the screen. Just tapping with three fingers shows that bar, which is probably all you're managing to do accidentally.
The rest: three-fingered pinch-closed to copy ("picking up"); three-fingered pinch-open to paste ("putting down"); three-finger swiping left/right for undo/redo... and three-finger double-tap for an undo shortcut.
Totally agree this is undiscoverable, but it's also fairly well gated behind a single root gesture so once you understand the trigger it's memorable.
iOS already has three-finger pinch to copy/paste, and three-finger swipe to undo/redo. But I find that these gestures are too unreliable for regular use, the gestures almost always activate some other click target plus my other fingers are busy holding the phone.
Although there are now[1] three non-shaking ways to access undo[2] - 1) the three-finger tap which brings up the copy and paste icon bar also contains undo and redo, 2) three-finger swipe left, 3) three-finger double tap (which isn't 100% reliable for me in things like Safari since it tends to trigger "show me the tabs").
This was replaced in iOS 13 by a less comical, yet equally undiscoverable three-finger tap gesture.
Considering that command-Z is not discoverable either, it’s not too bad, especially as there are undo/redo/clipboard buttons on the keyboard in most cases.
In iOS 13 it's worse, because they just changed all of it up. Now shaking and the old gestures for moving the cursor or getting the copy/paste menu don't work either. Instead it's three-finger directional swipes and pinches and long-touching a caret to pick it up and whatnot.
There are a couple of problems with that. One is that now instead of coordinating one finger you have to coordinate three, which may not be as easy for someone older. To be fair I think all of the gestures do have a simpler secondary alternative somewhere, but that brings the next issue.
iOS (and everyone else) quit documenting stuff a long time ago aside from in help snippets, over the idea that everything was "discoverable."
Aside from the core issue of expecting a user to "discover" complex and rarely-used gestures with no affordances, what happens when you "discover" they don't work anymore?
I guess you get to discover the help entry via Google, or find it in a Tom's Guide "35 things you didn't know you could do..." type article...once you finally realize they changed and that it isn't just you screwing it up.
We really need to create the equivalent of CUA for phone interfaces. Prior to that being broadly adopted, we had to deal with all kinds of variant menu structures and shortcuts in DOS-based and early GUI apps. After that, it was easy to move between things and (eliminating the entire freaking menu bar aside) things have stayed pretty stable since.
I've been using iphones for a decade and had no idea I could do this...not sure if it's a me problem or an apple problem but discoverability of gesture based shortcuts seems like a difficult challenge
> Crazy! Apparently there's a whole set of commands accessible this way, most notably three finger swipe left = undo!!! This is a significant improvement.
How is that an improvement? I get that the shaking gesture is horrible, but this one is not better: a three finger swipe is unusual, impossible to discover, hard to do. I don’t get why swiping left, usually associated with going to the right (= forward in Western cultures), is here used to undo (= going backward).
On the other hand, most ordinary non-technical folk I know of don't know about about iOS swipe-to-go-back gestures, as iOS has largely moved from buttons to non-discovered swipes, special presses that most people won't know about unless they RTFM which they never do.
When various swipe gestures were introduced, a lot of folks (rightly) said it was an unusually undiscoverable move for Apple (the same was said of trackpad gestures on their laptops). I still see people doing far more interaction than necessary to accomplish certain tasks that have simple gestures available. And with force touch/long press, that got even more complicated, as some gestures can trigger different behavior if you press too hard/long (made more likely if your screen is cracked; I often accidentally go into the task switcher when I meant to go back in Safari).
All of that being said, while this is even less discoverable by far, it’s good that they’ve made it optional and arbitrarily configurable. Also a fairly unusual thing for Apple, though less so in the Cook era.
I think something mostly unmentioned, but implicit, in a lot of the power features of iPadOS is that they work great with a keyboard using shortcuts most people are already familiar with (e.g. command-c). The three-finger gestures, I agree, are pretty weird but you always have the keyboard (and the cut/copy/paste action menu).
> The most useful feature is the ability to swipe between desktops and applications, just like on OS X. Swiping four fingers in either direction switches desktops or applications, even using the same animation as on the desktop.
iOS's heavy reliance on this gesture is a great example of how bad it's gotten. Unlike drawers, which usually have some kind of pullable tab, or reorderable items in a list, which have little icons indicating grabbable-ness, there is no visual cue that items can be swiped left. If you've never used iOS before, you have no way to delete important things unless you've been instructed how to from friends or iPhone-using ancestors.
> 2. God help you if the insertion point is just a character or two away from where you need it: you either have to do the long-press on the keyboard, then carefully drag to correct it, or tap somewhere else completely and then tap where you want it.
I don't know if anyone remembers but back in 2012ish there was a jailbreak tweak in Cydia that allowed you to move the cursor by swiping on your keyboard. It was really intuitive as you don't have to lift your fingers off the keyboard and I remember asking myself why this wasn't just part of iOS. Apple never added that feature to iOS and I still miss it. Not sure how it would have worked today with keyboard swiping but I wish apple let you switch between "swipe to type" and "swipe to move cursor".
FWIW, I recall being shown some of these new gestures (cut and paste, undo) in post-update iOS 13 splash screen of some kind.
By contrast, when I hardware swapped from XS to 11, nothing prepared me for the loss of formerly oh-so-intuitive 3D Touch. I’d read about it, didn’t realize how second nature it had become. I often saw others struggle with or unaware of 3D Touch, so my guess is Apple metrics showed it wasn’t as widely used as they’d hoped. The other positive is consistency, as I occasionally attempted 3D Touch on iPad or old phones and felt stymied.
All those things on ios are really shortcuts, sometimes really non obvious, I agree, but not essential to get things done. I think only shake to undo doesn't have a visible counterpart?
I think it's a three-finger swipe, isn't it? Though while trying it out, I did discover that a three-finger tap now shows another menu that makes undo/redo a little easier.
> For highly proficient users, this gets even worse as their is no command key equivalents for cut, copy, or paste. […] Part of the unspoken reason desktop clipboard use is so high is the speed in which it can be used. Mobile has none of this.
I recently discovered [1] that iOS has several three-finger pinch/swipe gestures for copy, paste, cut, undo, and redo. Apparently these gestures were introduced in 2019/iOS 13 [2]. While they are certainly not the easiest gestures to reliably perform, they at least do not suffer from the issues of ambiguity described by the author.
[1]: accidentally, of course, because the discoverability of many features on mobile is quite poor
[2]: https://9to5mac.com/2019/06/12/gestures-undo-ios-iphone-ipad...
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